For the first couple of deals, own buyer list or someone else's network?

I am looking at this from the other end, since dispo is one of the roles I have been circling as something I might do for other people. What strikes me about your option two is that you would be paying to watch someone work. That is not nothing. The pricing calls, the way they handle a buyer who retrades after the walk, the actual scripts, all of that is visible if you stay in the email chain instead of just collecting a check. If you go that way I would negotiate for being copied on everything rather than just for a lower percentage.

Land buyers are a completely different list from house buyers, so check whose network you are renting before you assume reach means anything.

I am on four of these lists as a buyer and I can tell you what separates them. One of them sends me things that match what I told them I wanted, at a price that has clearly been checked against something. The other three send everything to everyone. I open the first one. I have a filter for the rest. So when you compare a network with 12,000 names against your 41, the real question is how many of those 12,000 still open the emails. Nobody selling you access will answer that honestly, but you can ask for the last six closings and who bought them.

Some vocabulary first, since the thread is using it fast.

Disposition, dispo for short, is the selling half of a wholesale deal. You have a property under contract at a price, and dispo is the work of finding the buyer who takes your place in that contract and pays more than you agreed to pay. The difference is the spread, and if you are assigning the contract the piece you get paid is usually called the assignment fee.

A buyer network or marketplace is a business that keeps a database of investor buyers and pushes deals to them. You pay in one of a few shapes. A subscription, a flat fee per closing, a percentage of the spread, or some mix. The thing you are actually buying is the quality of that database, which is why quill's question about recent closings is the right one.

On your choice, the variable that decides it is your contract terms rather than your list size. If your earnest money goes non-refundable early and your inspection period is short, slow selling can cost you the deposit, and paying for reach is a way of buying speed. If your first contracts have long inspection windows and small deposits, you can afford to sell slowly and keep the whole spread while your own list grows.

One caution. Whether assigning a contract, and whether marketing a property you do not own yet, requires a license or specific disclosures differs by state, and several states have tightened this recently. Confirm the current rules for your state with a real estate attorney there before your first contract, not after.

Verification is where I would spend the effort regardless of which option wins. A name and an email is not a buyer. A buyer is someone who has told you a zip code, a price ceiling, a condition tolerance, and how they fund, and who has closed something in the last year that you can look up. Getting that out of 41 people is maybe forty phone calls. That is a week of evenings, and at the end of it you know whether you have six buyers or zero.

I priced out list building for a service I am putting together and it was more expensive than I expected. Cold calling from recorded cash purchases, my cost landed near 55 dollars per buyer who gave me a real buy box, counting my own time at something modest. So 100 verified buyers is a five thousand dollar project and about three months. A network subscription looks cheap against that until you notice you are renting and they can raise the rent. Both are real costs. I would not pretend option one is free just because the money leaves as hours.

We run both and the split has settled at roughly 70 30. Seventy percent of our closings come off our own list, which is 210 verified buyers after two years of work, and thirty percent go to outside networks when a deal is the wrong shape for our people or when the clock is bad. The outside channel costs us real spread, somewhere between 25 and 40 percent depending on who takes it, and it has saved two deals this year that would have died on my desk. bramble, if you have 41 names your own list cannot carry a deal yet. It carries a deal at maybe 120. Plan for the outside channel now and start the phone calls anyway.

As one of the people getting these emails, a stranger emailing me a contract on a house looks the same either way.